Carpe Fulgur On The Relationship With EasyGameStation

Following our question about how Carpe Fulgur got started, we asked co-founder, Andrew Dice, about their relationship with their first development partner, EasyGameStation, the doujin team behind Recettear.

“Well, because [Carpe co-founder] Robin has essentially native-speaker Japanese proficiency, communicating our intent was easy,” Andrew told Siliconera. “Convincing EGS that a bunch of complete nobodies without any real, demonstrable previous experience in the industry were the best guys to bring Recettear to the world? That was hard.”

EasyGameStation were actually looking for an English-language publishing partner for Recettear at the time. They had just declined to have a previous partner of theirs take the project on, , so Carpe Fulgur’s negotiations were well-timed. Even so, the process to convince EGS that Carpe had the necessary skill to give the game a quality localization took months.

Now, the two parties share a collaborative working relationship and work closely on Recettear’s localization. We asked Andrew if there were plans to take this further. For Carpe Fulgur to, perhaps, act as conduit for EasyGameStation to communicate with their overseas fans, which is something not a lot of doujin developers get to do.

“Well, strictly speaking our contract only covers the localization of Recettear,” he replied.

“We have been trying to make sure that EGS understands how things are working on this side if the pond, though, and we even contacted them recently so they could help out someone who wanted to cosplay as Recettear’s main character,” he continued. “If EGS wants to communicate more with their Western fans in the future, we’re perfectly willing to help out!”

Our ongoing interview with Carpe Fulgur is currently centered around the localization of Recettear. CP have graciously agreed to take on reader questions, so if there’s anything you’re curious about, this is the post to ask in, and we’ll include the best questions in our discussion.

I’d love to see this game on PSN and/or XBLA. (But moreso PSN because I have a PS3, *whistle*)

Joanna

Actually, I think it could even go on WiiWare, since the graphics aren’t too complex. I’m just not sure about the size, but if it fits, I don’t see why all three digital distribution venues for the consoles could not be used.

Well, I’ll go into the whole consoles thing in depth with Ishaan, but I’ll say right now that *all three* would be very difficult. The wildly varying processing architectures would make porting a nightmarishly expensive (and lengthy) proposition.If any porting occurs, it would likely be to one specific console, just to keep costs down.

Joanna

I never thought of that. I guess we should all be glad the game is even being published instead of whining about console ports.

This is brief, so I can answer it here: exceptionally unlikely. The Mac is an even smaller gaming platform in Japan than it is in the West so there’s no real domestic incentive for EGS to spend time porting it, especially when they could work on new projects.

A lot of people have been reporting success with the Wine wrapper, though!

JustaGenericUser

Are you part of the developer/publisher staff? If so, can you answer this: Is there a chance of it being ported to PSN, XBLA, and Wiiware?

Well, i definitely gonna buy this, i hope everyone supports the game legally as well

Joanna

I finished playing the demo recently and it was a really fun game. Localization was good too. :)

Joanna

I don’t know if this is too late, but here is my question: When confronted with a unique Japanese phrase, joke, or word, how does Carpe Fulgur go about localizing it? How did Carpe Fulgur decide that Recettear was the game with which they would begin their debut as Japanese video game publishers for North America? Was it the type of game it was? or the art? or maybe familiarity with EasyGameStation’s previous work?

“When confronted with a unique Japanese phrase, joke, or word, how does Carpe Fulgur go about localizing it?”This gets covered in another upcoming part of the interview, so I’ll leave it there.”How did Carpe Fulgur decide that Recettear was the game with which they would begin their debut as Japanese video game publishers for North America? Was it the type of game it was? or the art? or maybe familiarity with EasyGameStation’s previous work?”Hmm, I’ll see if we can squeeze this in, but the backlogged content is already getting kind of huge.